[Wylug-discuss] Btrfs home server

[Scott Hodgson]

Wish I had known before, as I would have bought 3 off you. But got mine now.

On 23 September 2017 07:58:17 BST, andrew glass <andrew.glass at outlook.com> wrote:
>Just a quick heads up, if anyone needs any 1TB 3.5 inch drives I have 
>a few of them (Toshiba) that I took out of a 16 bay disk array that I
>decommissioned. Nothing wrong with them just old now. I’m still using
>some without any issues. Not sure how much they would be worth on eBay.
>Open to offers if anyone is interested. Darren I’ll bring that ddr3 ram
>to the meeting on Thursday as well.
>
>Cheers
>
>Andy
>
>Sent from my iPhone
>
>On 22 Sep 2017, at 12:27, Scott Hodgson via Wylug-discuss
><wylug-discuss at wylug.org.uk<mailto:wylug-discuss at wylug.org.uk>> wrote:
>
>Hi John
>
>Thanks for the info. Yes I think a separate OS disk would be best.
>BTRFS is quite a complex beast when you use it for more than a basic
>setup. I have been trying lxd with dockers in them and took me ages to
>figure out that an unprivileged container was the issue with docker
>getting permissions.
>
>I ended up getting 2 used server disks on eBay Seagate es sata3, so
>will see how they workout for me. SMART says they both have over 2
>years left in them.... We will see.
>
>Where did you get the ssd's from, any feedback of a good brand to look
>out for?
>
>Thanks
>
>Scott
>
>PS I found irc #btrfs handy for problems, specifically someone irc
>nickname darkling - really knowledge on it.
>
>On 21 September 2017 15:52:09 BST, John Leach via Wylug-discuss
><wylug-discuss at wylug.org.uk<mailto:wylug-discuss at wylug.org.uk>> wrote:
>
>On Tue, 2017-09-19 at 16:23 +0000, Scott Hodgson via Wylug-discuss
>wrote:
> Hi
>
> Wanting to know what peoples thoughts are on setting up the
> filesystem on a home server.
> Got a 2 x 1tb hard drives setup for raid1.
> I want to use Linux containers for some websites so tried BTRFS. I
> used sda2 for uefi sda2 as BTRFS for /. Sda2 was then put in raid
> with BTRFS and sub volumes added.
> To test, I unplugged one of the drives but upon a reboot it went
> straight to initramfs shell. I sorted that by adding degraded to
> fstab and grub, however even though the partitions have the same
> uuid, it doesn't boot for one of the drives which makes me fear I
> could lose the information.
> Now I want the function of Btrfs but a bit more easy to use FS. My
> options are have a root partition and a /var partition and then make
> them BTRFS or other suggestions of a FS. Though do I use mdadm raid
> or btrfs raid or zfs raid? What are my options? Anyone have a
> solution? All opinions welcome.
>
>
>
>I've been running a home server using btrfs raid1 for several years now
>without any problems.
>
>I run it under Debian, but I avoided the kinds of boot problems you
>mentioned by actually booting from a small cheap 32GB SSD, which holds
>the OS. Which means, given a problem with btrfs, I can always boot and
>sort it out.
>
>Obviously the SSD could fail, but it doesn't handle very many
>reads/writes and doesn't hold any important data so is easy to replace
>and reinstall given a problem (I backup the configs to the btrfs :)
>
>A bit of a cop-out I know, but still, it's worked nicely for a long
>time.
>
>For your case, it's worth noting that, to be able to boot from both
>disks directly (i.e: if one fails) they need the right boot sector
>stuff and grub installation on both disks. I had the same problem with
>the standard md raid1 setup. I never found a very satisfactory solution
>for this - it was always a very complicated manual process to ensure
>both disks were setup for boot. And it (usually) needs redoing any time
>you upgrade grub.
>
>
>The most annoying thing about this is, neither of my disks have
>actually had a single problem. Not a single bit flipped. I run a btrfs
>scrub every week and never had even one checksum problem or bad read.
>That's with almost 4TB of data, millions of files, constantly churning.
>
>I think I won the hard disk lottery. They'll go eventually and then
>I'll be thankful for btrfs :)
>
>John.
>
>
>
>
>
>--
>Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
>--
>Wylug-discuss mailing list
>Wylug-discuss at wylug.org.uk<mailto:Wylug-discuss at wylug.org.uk>
>https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/wylug-discuss

-- 
Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/wylug-discuss/attachments/20170923/b198fc06/attachment.html>